Transcript

00:00:00

>>

NOISE]>>

A sober response to the Donald Trump presidency or California dreaming? According to a recent Reuters Ipsos poll, a third of California residents support the state's peaceful withdrawal from the union. In 2014 it was one in five. Reuters reporter, Sharon Bernstein is in the state's capital.

00:00:20

>> California is a majority Democrat state. About two-thirds of voters here picked Hillary Clinton in the recent US presidential election. And soon after, after the election of Donald Trump, jokes started going around here. Maybe the state should consider seceding from the US.>> And Californians coined a catchy name to go with the latest surge in succession interest, Calexit, like Brexit.

00:00:46

But unlike the UK's exit from the European Union, the California secession would be nearly impossible politically and legally. Even if California with its 39 million residents is the sixth largest economy in the world. Still lawmakers and regulators in California have been laying the groundwork to fight Trump's conservative populist agenda.

00:01:06

Last month, they introduced measures to protect undocumented immigrants and only minutes after Trump was sworn in on Friday, they released a more stringent measure to cut greenhouse gases. And Governor Jerry Brown's pick for the state's attorney general, who has vowed to fight for immigration and worker protections, was confirmed on Monday.

00:01:25

If this all sounds familiar, it's because it should. Texas caught secession fever when former President Barack Obama took office. Little did the state know that in eight years, it'd be right back where it wanted to be.